[elrepo] [el5 kernel] NIC and XHCI for Kaby Lake: feasibility

[Björn Gerhart]

Hi folks,

a customer wants to keep his CentOS5 installation, but at the same time 
change the hardware platform to Skylake (in particular even Kaby Lake).

As X is not used anyway, the graphic chipset support fortunately is not 
relevant.

But USB support is required: With this chipset, the USB3 host adapter 
can not run in USB2 emulation mode any more. As I understand, this means 
that the xhci_hcd module would be needed to operate USB devices. The el5 
kernel does not provide that module.

Furthermore, the Intel NIC device 15b8 ("Ethernet Connection (2) 
I219-V") is required. Following Intel's history, the e1000e driver 
received support for it in October 2015. The latest el5 package 
therefore is kmod-e1000e-3.1.0.2-1.el5.elrepo.i686.rpm from August 2015. 
With this module loaded, eth0 is not getting detected by the kernel.

 From my understanding, technically it could be possible to update the 
el5 e1000e driver to support the I219-V NIC.
However, I'm unsure if the el5 kernel offers the requisites to integrate 
the xhci_hcd module at all.

How would you rate the general feasibility to integrate support for the 
NIC and the USB host controller for the el5 kernel?


Note: with the latest kernel-lt-3.2.84-1.el5.elrepo.i686.rpm for el5 
installed, a USB keyboard can operate without the feature of toggling 
the NumLock state. When connecting or disconnecting any USB device, the 
kernel log does not show up anything and the device gets ignored.

Best - Björn